David Bowie | Space Oddity | The Man Who Sold the World | Hunky Dory
The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars | Aladdin Sane | Pin Ups | Diamond Dogs | Young Americans
Station to Station | Low | "Heroes" | Lodger | Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) | Let's Dance | Tonight | Never Let Me Down
Tin Machine | Black Tie White Noise | The Buddha of Suburbia | Outside | Earthling | 'hours...' | Heathen | Reality | 'hours...'
The Next Day | ★ | Changesonebowie
- Creator Backlash:
- Bowie held Tonight in much disdain in the years after his release, holding reservations even towards its bigger highlights (i.e. viewing "Loving the Alien" as overproduced and "Blue Jean" as flat-out sexist). His distaste for the album seemed to emerge not too long after its release, if his (ultimately failed) attempts at returning to his rock roots with Never Let Me Down are any indication.
- Co-producer and lead engineer Hugh Padgham also viewed the album somewhat unfavorably for a long while, stating that he could tell from the start that it wasn't up to snuff with Bowie's more acclaimed material. He has, however, warmed up to it in recent years, describing it at a good album in its own right during an interview for Bowie TV.
- Creator-Driven Successor: For better or for worse, this album is the closest Bowie ever got to making a follow-up to Pin Ups, given the sheer abundance of song covers here; Bowie even described it in an interview as "a kind of violent effort at a kind of Pin Ups." Somewhat fittingly, the original plan for a Pin Ups sequel was to fill it with covers of classic songs by American artists (as a counterpart to the British Invasion songs on the 1973 album), and all of the artists covered on Tonight are American ones.
- Direct to Video: How Jazzin' for Blue Jean was distributed, being a videocasette and LaserDisc-exclusive release. It being 21 minutes long kept it from being viable for MTV airplay, leading to the creation of the alternate Performance Video for "Blue Jean" (which in fact is included within the short film on a TV screen).
- Rarely Performed Song: This album's material mostly vanished from Bowie's setlists following the Glass Spider Tour in 1987, owed to Bowie's fierce Creator Backlash. The most representation Tonight got post-1987 consisted of "Blue Jean" reappearing during the Sound + Vision tour and both it and "Loving the Alien" appearing in the supporting tour for Reality.
- Referenced by...: The Past Doctor Adventures novel Loving the Alien is named after this album's opener.
- Throw It In!: How the lyrics to "Dancing with the Big Boys" were written; Bowie and Pop simply got as hammered as possible and belted out random lines at each other that they then incorporated into the song.
- What Could Have Been
- Given that the album as it is came about because of Bowie feeling the need to rush out a follow-up to Let's Dance despite struggling with post-touring writer's block, the obvious question emerges as to how Tonight might've turned out had Bowie waited until his creative juices were flowing again.
- On a more minor note, the booklet included with the Loving the Alien [1983-1988] Boxed Set includes scans of two discarded variants for the cover art of Tonight. One shows Bowie with a more vividly blue face, the other features him with a green face; both variants also feature his hair colored closer to his natural dirty-blonde than the bright yellow featured on the final cover art, and use a different variant of the background pattern.
- Also included in the booklet is a photo of a clone tape copy of Tonight made just three months before release, featuring the A and B sides in opposite places; why the decision was made to switch the positions of the two sides between then and September 1984 is unknown.
- In his essay on the album for the Loving the Alien [1983-1988] Boxed Set, co-producer and lead engineer Hugh Padgham stated that Bowie had written and co-written seven original songs for Tonight (a whole other album's worth), but only four ultimately made it on. One can only wonder how those songs would've fared compared to the compositions that did make it, and whether or not their inclusion would've made Tonight better-received; for his part, Padgham described the cut songs as having had "great 'cred' potential."
